29 Nov 2010: Analysis

Sustainable Palm Oil: Rainforest Savior or Fig Leaf?

The push to promote sustainable palm oil is turning into a test case for green consumerism. The outcome could help determine the future of the rainforests of Asia and Africa — and whether consumer pressure can really sway corporate giants.

by fred pearce

The spoof advertisement could scarcely have been nastier for the chocolate firm Nestle. It showed a worker taking a break at the office and eating a Kit Kat bar that turns into the finger of a baby orangutan, with blood oozing everywhere. The online video, which appeared early this year, helped persuade Nestle to change its policy on the use of palm oil grown – so campaigners claim — on land that once nurtured forested orangutan habitat.

It also encouraged the Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil, a coalition of environmentalists and palm oil growers, traders and users, to launch its trademarked logo for certified sustainable palm oil to be put on food and cosmetics packaging beginning in early 2011. And it raised afresh the question of whether consumer pressure on big companies can deliver major environmental improvement.

RSPO

The Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil says its logo will appear on thousands of products.

Can we tame the corporate giants of consumerism? Or are we deluding ourselves that we can put the fright into the likes of Nestle, Wal-Mart and BP? And even if some green-minded Westerners can successfully demand that these multinational companies clean up their act, surely the rapacious new consumers across Asia will undermine our efforts?

The fate of palm oil in the marketplace is rapidly become a test case for green consumers. And despite some setbacks and plenty of skepticism, I think there are causes for optimism.

Palm oil has overtaken soya as the world’s number one source of vegetable oil. It is found in everything from biscuits to biodiesel, detergents to potato chips, cookies to shampoo, and candy and cosmetics. In fact, palm oil is now found in about half of all packaged goods on the shelves.

Palm oil is squeezed from the red fruit of the oil palm tree, primarily in Indonesia and Malaysia. Demand has doubled in the last decade because it delivers more vegetable oil per-hectare than rival oils like soya or sunflower, and because of health concerns about these other fats. Palm oil is free of trans fats. Its two major producing nations are riding the wave of an industry that now produces 50 million tons a year valued at roughly $40 billion.

But palm oil is usually grown on former rainforest land — sometimes recently-cleared land. Palm oil plantations cover 30,000 square kilometers of former forests in Indonesia alone, wiping out habitat for elephants, tigers, rhinos, orangutans and much else, and triggering enormous releases of carbon dioxide from lost forests and drained peat lands. By some counts Indonesia is, as a result, the world’s third-largest CO2 emitter, after China and the U.S.

With industry analysts predicting that palm oil is likely to require an extra 30,000 to 70,000 square kilometers in the coming decade, the stakes are immensely high. This is especially true as the palm oil juggernaut is now

Can the palm oil industry continue to meet rising demand without trashing more forests?

moving on to the forests of central and west Africa.

Can the Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil (RSPO) stop this rolling leviathan of environmental destruction? The RSPO was formed in 2003 by the environmental group WWF, the Anglo-Dutch foods and toiletries company Unilever, which is the world’s biggest buyer of palm oil, and other companies and industry organizations. Members today include growers, food manufacturers, commodity traders, retailers, and environmental groups.

Its aim is no less than “to make all the world’s palm oil production sustainable.” To that end, in November 2008, the first shipload of certified sustainable palm oil docked at Rotterdam in the Netherlands. At its recent meeting in Jakarta, the RSPO announced what could be its most important move — the creation of a “sustainable palm oil” trademark that it says “will be carried by thousands of consumer products worldwide.” The logo should start appearing on products in early 2011. It will, says the RSPO president, Unilever’s Jan Kees Vis, show that the product “does not contribute to the sustained destruction of valuable tropical forests or damage the interests of people in the regions where the palms are grown.”

The clearing of Indonesia’s rain forest for palm oil plantations is having profound effects – threatening endangered species, upending the lives of indigenous people, and releasing massive amounts of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, journalist Tom Knudson writes.READ MORE

Some are bound to contest that broad claim. What is “sustained destruction”? Is unsustained destruction OK? And who is to determine “the interests of people in the regions”? Human rights NGOs in Indonesia have been swift to note that some companies that have obtained the RSPO seal of approval “are involved in unresolved conflicts with local communities” over land. There will be battles ahead. But nobody said sustainability was an easy concept. And debate about its meaning can, of itself, be part of the solution.

Can the industry continue to meet rising demand without trashing more forests? Some doubt this. But as a result of failed land use policies in Southeast Asia, and especially Indonesia, there are huge areas of land that have been deforested by loggers but now lie abandoned. Often the loggers gained their licences by promising local communities jobs on palm oil plantations once the clearing was completed. They often claimed the profits from selling the logs were necessary to fund the plantations. Then they high-tailed it with the logging money.

So targeting this abandoned land makes sense. According to an Indonesian government report earlier this year, it has 60,000 square kilometers of degraded land “available for palm oil expansion.” But will that land get used, or will the companies simply engage in another orgy of forest destruction?

Perhaps the RSPO can help prevent that. All depends on whether the great food manufacturers and store chains that buy the products of the plantations start insisting on taking only sustainable palm

There are already signs of an outbreak of the rule of law in some of the world’s rainforests.

oil and products containing it. Can consumer concern, even among a minority, be translated into corporate buying policy?

We should not be too cynical. There are already signs of an outbreak of the rule of law in some of the world’s rainforests, especially Brazil, but also Indonesia and parts of Central Africa. The sheriffs are rolling into town, thanks in part to Western consumer pressure.

Of course, some illegal loggers have simply gone straight and started paying their taxes. They are still logging. But even so, as incentives for the most rapacious forms of logging diminish, the spotlight moves to the new frontier, land cleared to plant large-scale commodity crops.

There is a huge way to go before most of the world’s chocolate bars and lipsticks contain sustainable palm oil. Progress in the first seven years of the RSPO has been so slow that many have dismissed it as a corporate fig leaf. It has few funds, and no powers to investigate the activities of its members. Critics say companies join the roundtable as an insurance policy against being accused of ripping out the rainforests, but do little to alter the practices of their suppliers. “We are doing what we can,” the companies say. “But it is very difficult to persuade all those nasty Indonesia plantation companies.”

But the RSPO is not just a corporate club. In November it announced that 25,000 palm oil family farms had signed up, after having certification audits. Unilever’s Vis promised “hundreds of thousands more” from among the estimated 3 million smallholders growing palm oil. How good are the audits? We don’t know. But the move shows a widespread desire to buy into the idea of sustainability among small landholders, if only so they can continue to sell their crop to processors that in turn regard it as important. This is how change happens.

While some big-hitting NGOs like Conservation International and the

More and more corporations are buying into sustainable palm oil to protect their reputations.

World Resources Institute have signed up with the RSPO from the start, others have been more cautious. The Rainforest Action Network (RAN), an observer at this year’s proceedings in Jakarta, noted that the big Malaysian and Indonesian producers are being dragged very reluctantly toward their claimed goal. “I’ve now got serious doubts about the sincerity of some of the RSPO members,” blogged RAN’s observer on the the RSPO meeting’s final day.

Earlier in the year RAN welcomed a change of heart from Cargill, the commodities giant that numbers palm oil among its most important products, when it promised henceforth to supply palm oil to Unilever that is “certified and segregated at every step of the supply chain.” But the deal only covers 10,000 tons, a tiny percentage of the volumes that Cargill trades annually.

What about the rest? Cargill continues to buy from the Sinar Mas Group, the largest producer in Indonesia, which RAN charges with the continued destruction of rainforests, including peat lands and orangutan habitat. RSPO members only account for 40 percent of world production. “A global market shift cannot happen until influential companies in China and India move towards sustainability,” says WWF, one of the RSPO’s founders.

Nonetheless, more and more corporations are buying into sustainable palm oil to protect their reputations. More than 6 percent of palm oil production is now certified as sustainable, double the figure of only a year ago. And the public pressure is mounting.

Getty Images

Palm oil is squeezed from the red fruit of the oil palm tree, grown primarily in Indonesia and Malaysia.

The stakes are immensely high. They are high for the rainforests of Southeast Asia and Africa, which could face wipeout unless the palm oil juggernaut is stopped. But they are also high for consumer environmentalism. If palm oil can be tamed, then so can other global commodities grown at great environmental expense — like cotton, soya, cocoa and the many food crops now being co-opted for biofuels. And if they can be tamed, then why not coal and oil?

If globalization can make the consumer king, then maybe consumers can accomplish what politicians have failed to do. Anyone for a Kit Kat?

COMMENTS

This is one of the most balanced analysis of the current state of the Sustainable palm Oil initiative I have seen. As a member of RSPO for the past four years we have seen the progress made in the certification of production. Despite the screaming negative headlines by some of the NGOs we believe this is an honest standard with a strict set of guidelines for all involved in the certification process. It is a fact that if a company is involved in clearing virgin forest or clearing land by burning for example, they will not be certified, simple as that.

The primary risk to this initiative is from a lack of support for certified oil from the consuming countries. The producers acted in good faith when they set aside land to create buffer zones etc and incurred all the other costs of certification but they expected to see some differentiation in price between certified oil and non certified oil but this has not materialized up to now.

Posted by
Paul Larkin
on 29 Nov 2010

An option is to choose products without palm oil. There are many options for replacing palm oil in our daily use. We have developed a shop by icon specifically for palm oil-free at http://www.bonafidegreengoods.com/shop_by_icon.php?icon_id=palmoilfree .
This allows consumers to make better choices.

Posted by
Deborah deMoulpied
on 30 Nov 2010

"rival oils like soya or sunflower, and because of health concerns about these other fats. Palm oil is free of trans fats."

implying what? that Sunflower and Soya Bean oils contain trans fats? If there's any health benefits, these other - much higher in unsaturated fats and much lower in saturated fats without ANY trans fats - oils such as Sunflower, Soya, Olive and Canola oils are far "better" for you than Palm Oil.

This one section really makes me question the accuracy and "balance" of this entire article.

Posted by
Pete
on 30 Nov 2010

@Pete: Why should the type of oil make any difference? The article is merely explaining why
palm oil is being used more and more; it is not making a case for palm oil. Besides, why should it matter whether we plant destroyed virgin forest with sunflowers or palm?

Posted by
Joe
on 01 Dec 2010

I work with an Australian company who made the decision (without huge consumer pressure, ala Nestle) to make their cleaning products palm oil free.

We decided that the current direction of the RSPO was not doing nearly enough to curb the massive destruction occurring to forests and wildlife, particularly in the short term. This direction is doing very little to slow deforestation, or to preserve wildlife.

The more consumer pressure we can put on manufacturers and distributors, the more likely we are to be able to make a difference.

Ultimately, governments, supermarkets and major manufacturers will not change their behaviours unless it is demanded.

DEMAND CHANGE! BUY RESPONSIBLY!

Posted by
Sean O'Callaghan
on 02 Dec 2010

Excellent article Fred. Thanks.

I don't seen any conflict between buying palm oil free products while the industry pursues the RSPO approach. If we can reduce demand for expansion while certifying what is being produced now, this can only lead to be a better outcome, whereas the faster demand rises, the more unscrupulous players will enter the market.

The challenge is how to avoid for example, the current 30,000 sq kms being certified and used
by sensitive global companies while another 30,000 sq kms is added to the global industry and used by others. If this is in danger of occurring then avoiding use altogether will become the better option. But if it can all be certified then there's real potential as you say in closing.

Posted by
Paul Gilding
on 07 Dec 2010

I avoid Palm oil altogether since it is a highly saturated fat.

It is much better to use olive or canola oils in foods.

Posted by
John Roberts
on 12 Dec 2010

This is a well-researched article. As many other people have commented, alternatives exist to palm oil which companies and consumers need to acknowledge and begin to move towards.

The economics of producing Palm Oil today is one of the reasons it is used in such large measures. Making it more sustainable will eventually drive prices up and I am assuming companies away from this resource.

As a responsible company , we have pledged to not to use palm oil in any of our products - this
also helps us stick to locally available ingredients, which is a huge part of being sustainable.

Posted by
Preethi Sukumaran
on 13 May 2011

Sorry - this is poorly researched and demonstrates only that Fred really doesn't grasp the market.

It doesn't matter how much of a fuss Greenpeace make about large western brands like Nestle.

Most palm oil is consumed in Indonesia, China and India and there is no pressure from these
markets for sustainable palm oil.

Only about 1% of palm oil in the market is certified and that wont change much in the future. The issue is simply one of economic development for countries like Indonesia.

Fred - you really think "And despite some setbacks and plenty of skepticism, I think there are causes for optimism." ??

Posted by
Jones
on 27 May 2011

Kudos to Fred for a well written paper. The Inc Society of Palmhuggers though, has to take issue with his loaded question: "Can the Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil (RSPO) stop this rolling leviathan of environmental destruction?"

This "rolling leviathan of environmental destruction" is grown on only 0.22% of the world's agricultural land and yet produces a staggering 30% of the world's supply of edible oil, a fact acknowledged by Fred: "Palm oil has overtaken soya as the world’s number one source of vegetable oil," and "Demand has doubled in the last decade because it delivers more vegetable oil per-hectare than rival oils like soya or sunflower, and because of health concerns about these other fats."

Those 2 facts alone should have clued Fred in that something does not jive with all the palm oil deforestation hype!

Finally, we also have to ask: What's the alternative then. Plant soy, rapeseed and sunflower on palm oil land? There's no doubt that in that event, 10 times more land would have to be cleared just to produce the current quantity of palm oil. Then we would really have a rolling leviathan of rainforest destruction in Asia, Africa and South America!

Posted by
Palmhugger
on 08 Jul 2011

Palm Oil is probably THE MOST SATURATED VEGETABLE FAT comomonly used in foodstuffs in the world.

Highly saturated fats are linked with a host of diseases including heart disease.

Posted by
john Roberts
on 02 Oct 2011

The protection of earth's environment is a must for the survival of humanity. So we need to change our lifestyle. We can survive without oil palm but not without oxygen or water. We can create an oil palm plantation but we canot recreate a rainforest once it is deforested and obtain various goods and services it provides.

Posted by
asesh lahiri
on 28 Mar 2012

Comments have been closed on this feature.

ABOUT THE AUTHORFred Pearce is a freelance author and journalist based in the UK. He is environment consultant for New Scientist magazine and author of numerous books, including When The Rivers Run Dry and With Speed and Violence. His latest book is The Coming Population Crash and Our Planet’s Surprising Future. In earlier articles for Yale Environment 360, Pearce has written about the outlook for global climate talks in the wake of Copenhagen and the potential benefits of the tropical forest conservation plan known as REDD — or Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation.MORE BY THIS AUTHOR

RELATED ARTICLES

What Lies Behind the Recent Surge of Amazon Deforestation After declining by more than 70 percent in recent years, deforestation in the Amazon is soaring. In an interview with Yale Environment 360, scientist Philip Fearnside explains what’s driving the clearing of the Amazon and what needs to be done to once again bring deforestation under control.READ MORE

A Conservationist Sees Signs of Hope for the World’s Rainforests After decades of sobering news, a prominent conservationist says he is finally finding reason to be optimistic about the future of tropical forests. Consumer pressure on international corporations and new monitoring technology, he says, are helping turn the tide in efforts to save forests from Brazil to Indonesia.READ MORE

A New Leaf in the Rainforest: Longtime Villain Vows Reform Few companies have done as much damage to the world’s tropical forests as Asia Pulp & Paper. But under intense pressure from its customers and conservation groups, APP has embarked on a series of changes that could significantly reduce deforestation in Indonesia and serve as a model for forestry reform.READ MORE

With Fins Off Many Menus, A Glimmer of Hope for Sharksby ted williamsFor decades, the slaughter of sharks – sought after for their fins and meat – has been staggering. But bans on finning and new attitudes in Asia toward eating shark fin soup are leading to optimism about the future for these iconic ocean predators.READ MORE

As Extreme Weather Increases, A Push for Advanced Forecastsby cheryl katzWith a warmer atmosphere expected to spur an increase in major storms, floods, and other wild weather events, scientists and meteorologists worldwide are harnessing advanced computing power to devise more accurate, medium-range forecasts that could save lives and property.READ MORE

Could Global Tide Be Starting To Turn Against Fossil Fuels? by fred pearceFrom an oil chill in the financial world to the recent U.S.-China agreement on climate change, recent developments are raising a question that might once have been considered unthinkable: Could this be the beginning of a long, steady decline for the oil and coal industries?READ MORE

Can Green Bonds Bankroll A Clean Energy Revolution?by marc guntherTo slow global warming, tens of trillions of dollars will need to be spent in the coming decades on renewable energy projects. Some banks and governments are issuing green bonds to fund this transformation, but major questions remain as to whether this financing tool will play a game-changing role.READ MORE

What Is the Carbon Limit? That Depends Who You Askby fred pearceScientists are offering widely varying estimates of how much carbon we can emit into the atmosphere without causing dangerous climate change. But establishing a so-called carbon budget is critical if we are to keep the planet a safe place to live in the coming century. READ MORE

Beyond Treaties: A New Way of Framing Global Climate Actionby fred pearceAs negotiators look to next year’s UN climate conference in Paris, there is increasing discussion of a new way forward that does not depend on sweeping international agreements. Some analysts are pointing to Plan B — recasting the climate issue as one of national self-interest rather than global treaties. READ MORE

Oil Companies Quietly Prepare For a Future of Carbon Pricingby mark schapiro and jason scorseThe major oil companies in the U.S. have not had to pay a price for the contribution their products make to climate change. But internal accounting by the companies, along with a host of other signs, suggest that may soon change — though the implications of a price on carbon are far from clear. READ MORE

e360 MOBILE

e360 VIDEO

The Warriors of Qiugang, a Yale Environment 360 video, chronicles a Chinese village’s fight against a polluting chemical plant. It was nominated for a 2011 Academy Award for Best Documentary Short.
Watch the video.